Word: guantanamo
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...worry about me," Khan later wrote, trying to cheer up his family. "I'm happy. I've even given up smoking." According to the letter, like all Guantanamo inmates he lives in a 6.8-by-8 feet cell with a copy of the Koran for company. For 30 minutes every week, he is allowed out of this cage to exercise with his feet shackled. He and all other so-called "enemy combatants" were recently moved from Camp X-Ray to the larger Camp Delta several miles away, where the army is building an extra 204 cells for future captives...
...Most of Guantanamo's 598 detainees are indeed al-Qaeda terrorists. But, as U.S. authorities are finally conceding, the lovelorn Khan - and perhaps as many as 100 other captives - simply aren't. They were grabbed by mistake in the chaos of battle. As Rumsfeld said last week: "If you don't want them for intelligence, and you don't want them for law enforcement ... then let's be rid of them...
...year old Afghans ("They look 110," remarked one visitor), a Sudanese TV cameraman from the al-Jazeera network, and scores of hapless Pakistani youths who heeded the cry of jihad but found themselves abandoned and robbed on the battlefield by their fleeing Taliban brethren. Others were packed off to Guantanamo because they failed to pay extortion money to Kandahar city's secret police chief - supposedly a U.S. ally - who then denounced them as bin Laden henchmen...
...Guantanamo has, in fact, turned out to be a windfall for America's Afghan confederates. According to Pakistani detainees, the U.S. military paid the Northern Alliance $5,000 for each captive who confessed to being a Taliban and $20,000 for each purported al-Qaeda fighter. With that incentive, the prisoners claim the allied commanders grabbed any Pakistani wandering dazed around the battlefield, then extracted confessions by force...
...After visiting Guantanamo twice and interrogating the prisoners themselves, officials from Islamabad contend that only eight of the 58 Pakistani detainees had genuine links with al-Qaeda. Most, they say, are wannabe jihadis who were recruited from Pakistani mosques and crossed the frontier last October to join the Taliban after the war began. Their average age is between 20 and 22. "They broke down and cried when they saw us," says one Pakistani official. In Guantanamo, the Pakistani envoys say they asked the American jailers: "Why did you waste your time and money bringing them to Cuba when you could...